


Happiness

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ASiB, ASiP, Endearments, TGG, TRF, coming home, happiness isn't a list or is it, jet fuel & joy, what makes a man weak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-09-28
Packaged: 2017-11-15 05:27:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s that voice again saying, that’s *joy*, John Watson, and don’t you mistake it for something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happiness

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [stitchingatthecircuitboard](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard), who wants to see them happy.
> 
> Thanks to [Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion), for the filthy tea, and to  
> [professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl), for the coming home.

_“The black cube is the thought of return, that gate with my language turned on with the look of joy  
As the white dial of the altimeter turns.”-- Ardengo Soffici, “Aeroplano”_

**Tannins**

“Sweetheart,” John says, “sweetheart.”  He’s talking to himself again, or to a boy past hearing, to the dying, to the living who can’t hear him. Battlefield endearments are bitter and dark as the compounds in tea, that make it so.

Later, when he’s home in England (having bled out, having drunk all the sorrows of war), at Baker Street, he doesn’t tell Sherlock at first that this ritual isn’t just home and comfort to him, isn’t just his home country but that bitter undertug, the sugar and the almond, the cinnamon and the bark.

“Are you all right, John," Sherlock says one day after they’ve put the criminal away and come home and the kettle’s boiled.

“Fine,” he says. ( _More than fine, sweetheart_.)

Crime: should not be sweet but is.

**Iodine**

Sherlock makes lists of observations, and, John later learns, memories, projections, speculations and maybe even fantasies, condensed perfectly, objectively correlated into compounds and elements and substances and things.  An event translated.  A person in a particular moment.  A wish.  A crime.  An injury.

This one is “tar,fishhook,phosphates.” 

“Well,” John says, holding Sherlock’s hand, “It’ll mend.” He doesn’t say “heal” but that’s what he means, not just the injury he’s inspected and assessed and is now about to disinfect but the wounded pride, the fear, that moment of vulnerability, the accumulation of which make a man weak.

Sherlock holds out the bottle as an offering, a directive: _Here, mend me._ The colour of it, darker than blood, the scent, sharp, nostalgic, not meant to be drunk.

Sherlock’s thinking halogens, of course, diatomics, and John’s thinking surgical sites, emergency survival kits; no, he’s thinking _here now_ , home, your fingers grown alarmingly familiar, your wrists and your trigger finger, your bow hand, faintly stained, the one lighter hair, just there, coppery not white, ten degrees southeast of the wristwatch, your soft, affronted breath.

_(Mend me.)_

So many things make a man weak, some worth it.

**Ozone**

There’s the sharp scent of chlorine in lightning storms over the desert, over the ocean, the collection of gases on aircraft, the myth (Victorian, maybe) that oxygen, tripled, gives the sea its scent, not phytoplankton and sulfides. There’s the storm that breaks over Tottenham Court Road and leaves them damp and touched by the Gulf Stream.

”Long day," John says, shrugging in the wet. “I could be unhappy about it, but I’m not.”

“Happiness," says Sherlock, looking into the ether, “is roughly the chemical equivalent of sleep.”

Well, that’s a predictable thing, isn’t it, for him to say, but the sea is on his clothes and on his neck and he’s wild as a boy on a beach. (John suddenly hears him saying, “well, _you_ stormed Normandy,” as though they’d taken a lightning strike and been transported back into the mid-twentieth, laughing the whole way because time is so _saline_ , and so irrelevant.)  But the sea is on his clothes and later on John’s too, and here they are, looking up, buzzing like blue molecules in the aftermath, and here’s Sherlock, smiling, the map of London glowing in his palm.

**Jet Fuel**

The plane goes down in John’s dreams, dumping fuel.  In real life, it does too, or it might have, ditched, dematerialized, disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle of bureaucracy.

A case. Those unseen hands that plucked them from one explosion and plunged them into another.  Heathrow with its conveyances (of the doomed, of lonely virgins and damaged psyches).  Sherlock shrinks in his brother’s eyes to the engine thrum and the hostile aromatics in the seat-fabric of an airplane of the dead, their sighs littering the air. _Well this is your work, this is what you traffic in, isn’t it_ , say Mycroft’s eyes. _(and mine too, brother, mine too._ )  All John might have considered, Sherlock thinks,is how he might have prevented anyone from going out like that, party to an engineered explosion that won’t even blow.  (No, he’s wrong;all John might have thought about was how to keep him from tearing off on a collision course, hatched and crossed as a contrail.)

John has never really liked planes, save the one that carried him from one battlefield to another, trafficked him across the rivers (oceans, canyons, sky deserts and cloud ranges) of the dead, that brought him home, to this.

**Gun Oil**

When John, maybe looking to put his weapon in order and digging through drawers for a cloth, finds a list one day, blue ink on oyster-grey stationery in Sherlock’s offhandedly elegant backhand, that begins with “tannins” and ends with “gun oil,” he picks it up, holds it for a minute (brisk, posh, blue-grey), letting the crisp edges of the paper slice into his fingers.

Oh my god, says the voice in John’s mind (is it his own), we’re going to grow old together. It’s such a cliché, but it’s like being shot (backwards); no, it’s like Jefferson Hope (hope is offence and defence in perfect balance), and there’s that voice again saying, that’s _joy_ , John Watson, and don’t you _mistake_ it for something else.

Later, much later, maybe years later, Sherlock, sitting in their kitchen with the yellow-and-greened and faded list in his palm, says, “Of course you knew.”  “You knew," he says, smiling, “when you found this.” “It’s you," he says, "coming home from war.”

**Harbour Lights**

When he came home he thought about harbour lights, as the plane was descending, though he couldn’t see any, not with the fresh scars on his body and his country waiting for him all unscarred, or no, carrying its own wounds and flaws of conscience, waiting to give him nothing to come home to.  

He’s seen them since, though, the lights, so many times.

There were the first lights, the first night, the blinkers of the Met, the faint coralline glow of  three am-neon, later, the soft  beacons of Baker Street calling them in until they put them out. (It was similar, the night after Sherlock returned from the dead, similar, but not the same. He slept. John lowered the lights and shook with silent shock and saw haloes that weren’t there.)

John has slammed ambulance bay doors, lights flashing.

Sherlock has slammed  ambulance bay doors.

There were the nebulae.

There were the stars.

“When’s the last time you were happy,” Sherlock says. He asks these things now, now that they’re older and not softer exactly but more permeable, their markings more permanent.  “Obvious,” John says, looking out at the refractions of London,(and thinking, then, of a lab, at Barts of course, that hard landing in a bright place, that beautiful wheels-down scrutiny as he first knew it) “but I’ll tell you about the first.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> [ Grant Lee Phillips, “Happiness”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YpWVLVfYpo)
> 
>  
> 
> [ Tottennam Court Road, rainstorm](http://www.flickr.com/photos/51282757@N05/5947956781/)   
> [ Tottenham Court Road in snow](http://www.flickr.com/photos/melanieseasons/3250370548/)   
> [ Tottenham Court Road, fire](http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8011/7709504846_0075826e17.jpg)
> 
>    
> “He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life... On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.”—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


End file.
